Almost as soon as that article was posted, there was breaking news: A group of hackers was threatening to delete data from 627 million iCloud accounts unless they received a ransom payment.

Hackers Threaten iCloud

According to PC World, a group calling itself the Turkish Crime Family plans to wipe that data in two weeks if Apple doesn’t pay them a ransom of $150,000 via either Bitcoin or Ethereum cryptocurrency. It seems many of the icloud.com, me.com, and mac.com email accounts used to create the hacked iCloud accounts did not have security precautions like two-factor authentication activated.

While Apple and the authorities are not publicly commenting until they investigate the group’s claims, this incident is an excellent reminder: Backing up to one destination like iCloud puts all your eggs in one basket.

The best strategy is to establish dual protection of your data by creating multiple backups and storing them in different local and offsite locations. That’s the best way to minimize threats to your digital life.

Save them to two different formats, like an internal drive and external media (disk, USB, cloud, etc.).

And keep one copy off-site to protect against physical disasters like theft, fire or flooding.

By keeping separate copies of the backup in two different locations, you are establishing the kind of dual protection that can safeguard your important documents, online photo storage, and video archive, as well as the operating system, programs, apps and settings needed to restore your computer quickly.

Whether its threats like the current one facing iCloud Photo Library users or the continuous risk posed by viruses and hardware failure, having a backup strategy is essential for protecting your data. Using backup software like Acronis True Image that can automatically create backups to both local and remote destinations is the smart way to counter those challenges.